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CDC Starts Difficult Task of Recording Hurricane's Effects
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Larsen's comment came as the CDC's Clark, accompanied by two doctors from the agency's Epidemic Intelligence Service, visited the airport triage site to see what information they could glean there.
Activity at the airport was winding down rapidly. On successive days late last week, the field hospital treated 182, 158, 148 and 219 patients. At the height of the evacuation, it cared for more than 2,000 people over two days.
Larsen said the staff witnessed what happens when modern treatment of chronic disease is suddenly interrupted and underlying illness is worsened by stress and environmental conditions. There were lots of people with out-of-control blood pressure, diabetes or seizures, and people with innumerable less common problems such as mental illness, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease whose conditions got worse.
"We saw people seizing who hadn't taken their anticonvulsant medicines, we saw people who were alcoholics seizing because they didn't have any alcohol, and we saw people seizing because of total electrolyte imbalance from nothing to drink, nothing to eat and being out in the hot sun," Larsen said.
The long-term consequences of this, however, are likely to be minimal. The interruption of medical therapy was brief, and in many cases the evacuees' physiological state differed little from that experienced by countless Americans every day.
For example, 36 million people in the United States have hypertension (high blood pressure), and the disease is well-controlled in only 40 percent. About 18.2 million people have diabetes, but 5.2 million are unaware of it. Numerous studies have shown that people infected with the AIDS virus can safely stop their drugs for a week or so with no bad results.
The social and psychological consequences are another issue.
Sitting at a small table over a stained carpet on a concourse at the airport, Larsen tried to describe the days immediately after the storm and flood.
"The sadness of some of the stuff we have seen here is overwhelming," he said. "You see these people with little children, barefoot and holding all the things they own folded over in a sheet, people who have no idea where they're going or what their future is . . . "
His voiced choked and his eyes momentarily clouded with tears. Then he composed himself and continued.
